


With Abandon

by Stratisphyre



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Fluff, Food, Multi, Threesome - F/M/M, but probably a couple, not many spoilers, terrible brain rotting fluff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-24
Updated: 2015-12-24
Packaged: 2018-05-08 19:41:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,203
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5510564
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Stratisphyre/pseuds/Stratisphyre
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Cooking is like love - it should be entered into with abandon, or not at all." - Harriet van Horne</p>
<p>Five times Poe, Rey and/or Finn shared food, and one time they didn't.</p>
            </blockquote>





	With Abandon

**Author's Note:**

> Somehow, after years of reading them, I accidentally stumbled into a 5+1 fic. All kudos and comments are deeply appreciated.

Rey first meets Poe Dameron across Finn’s bedside, when he brings her a bowl of something that doesn’t look like it was recently rehydrated and a glass of something definitely stronger than water.

“Here,” he says, placing it down on the small table at her side—currently unoccupied save for a copy of the schematics of the Falcon and the map that leads to General Skywalker. “I didn’t see you at mess.”

“Wasn’t hungry,” Rey replies quietly. It’s only half a lie; she’s been far hungrier than this. She looks at him. Really looks. From the way Finn described him, she was expecting someone larger than life, but really he looks more than a little haggard, though he hides it well behind an exhausted half-smile. If he’s trying to hide his worry about Finn, he’s failing; his eyes keep darting to their mutual friend, and she can feel the concern radiating off him. “He’s not awake yet.”

Poe makes a wounded noise, quickly conceals it behind a cough, and drops into the seat next to her. “He’ll pull through.”

Rey wants to know where his confidence comes from, but likewise doesn’t want to ruin the tremulous hope the words inspire. They sit in silence until he nudges the bowl closer to her. “Eat.”

Rey glances at it, but doesn’t reach for it yet. “General Organa wants me to take the Falcon to go find General Skywalker. Says it has to be me.” Her brow furrows.

“She say why?” Poe asks. Is there a hint of jealousy in his tone? He’d been the one previously assigned to tracking down Skywalker. She searches for it, gathering up the focus that she’d first felt when facing against Renn, but all she can sense from him is gentle curiosity, layered under heavy worry.

“I told her about my fight with Kylo Renn.” Funny how she still can’t say his name without her lips twisting up in anger, of the thrum of her heartbeat tamping out an outraged rhythm. “She says if I’m going to use a lightsaber, I have to train for it or I’m like as not to cut my own foot off.” Rey hesitantly places a hand on Finn’s. “I don’t want to be sent away.” That’s a half-lie, as well. She wants to stay here, with Finn, but everything seems too close. Too much. Too alike to something she’s longed for since childhood and thought she was abandoning like she did Jakku. It feels like a betrayal, but she doesn’t know exactly who she’s betraying.

“But you’ll be coming back,” Poe says, with that same confidence in which he’d pronounced Finn’s diagnosis.

She slants a look his way. “How do you know?”

He shrugs. “From what Finn said? I’d bet on you.”

It coaxes a small smile out of her, and Rey finally sits back and retrieves the bowl. It’s some kind of meat dish—real, unprocessed, never-dehydrated meat—and seasoned with something other than wind-whipped sand. She takes a bite and practically moans into it. Flavours she hasn’t tasted since her childhood—flavours she’d convinced herself she’d imagined because nothing could ever taste as good—play across her tongue, spreading into her cheeks until she can’t help but smile as her face floods with warmth.

“Better than a ration pack, huh?” Poe laughs. “Wait ‘til you try dessert.”

Rey would answer, but she’s already stuffed in another mouthful.

* * *

When Finn wakes up, he asks for—in order—Rey, water and painkillers. Poe’s not sure about the guy’s priorities (lies, he totally is), but he arranges for the latter two, at least. He promised Rey before she left that he’d wait with Finn until he woke up, and it’s a relief that he hasn’t been waiting too long.

After he’s been hydrated and shot up with something that dull help with the swaths of healing flesh that managed to just barely protect his spine, he asks for Rey again. Finn seems to take the news of her departure fairly well. Or, at least, it seems that way, until he tries to push himself off his bed and starts asking for a ship.

“Woah, buddy.” Poe barely brushes him with his index finger before Finn’s falling back on his bed. “She’s coming back.” He doesn’t know how he’s gotten into the habit of making promises on other people’s behalf, but like he told Rey, he’d bet on her. “And she’s gonna be pretty pissed off if you reinjure yourself in the meantime.”

That finally gets him to calm down, and Poe would really love to know how these two have gotten to the point where the thought of disappointing one another has them so worked up. Finn reluctantly lies down, though he looks like he resents it.

It takes another few days before the med staff declare him fit to leave the bay, and Poe offers up the spare cot in his room with barely a second thought. Anything has to be better than the thin batting filling up the gurney he’s been on for the past couple weeks, and Finn looks relieved that he doesn’t have to be alone, though Poe’s in no doubt that there’s someone else he’d prefer for company.

Poe sacrificed the suite he was offered for something considerably smaller, but he still has a small kitchen, bedroom and a pretty comfortable living space. From the way Finn takes things in, not exactly awed but obviously impressed, it’s better than the living conditions the First Order offered.

“Dinner?” Poe offers. “I usually eat in the mess, but we can hang out here if you prefer.”

“That’d be… yeah.” Finn eases into one of the spare chairs, gingerly resting his back against it and then sitting forward again when that proves a poor idea.

It’s a longstanding Dameron tradition to eat away your problems, but Poe has sadly neglected his pantry during the course of his search for Luke Skywalker, and he only has a few simple staples. He settles for flapjacks with cane syrup—an old favourite of his parents, from back in their days with the Rebel Alliance, when it was all they seemed to eat—and barely puts them down in front of Finn before they’re messily devoured.

Finn and Rey obviously need someone to cook for them more often. His childhood memories are full of moments in his grandfather’s kitchen, something bubbling away on the stove and filling the entire house with savoury smells and generous warmth. He tries to imagine being raised on a sterile station, or alone in a desert, and the desire to feed them creeps up in the irrational impulse described by his grandfather when reminiscing about his grandmother.

Oh.

* * *

Rey returns looking like a wet loth-cat, irritated and frazzled and glaring at the world around her like the universe has wronged her.

All that fades away when her eyes lock with Finn’s across the hanger bay. It melts off her like snow under the sun, and she barely manages to stammer out an excuse to General Organa before she’s flying across the distance between them and leaping into his arms.

She smells like recycled air and freedom.

“I’m so glad you’re awake,” she babbles as she clings tightly to him. “I was so worried, and then they told me I had to be the one to go and find Luke Skywalker and I didn’t want to leave you but I had to and then he sent me away and then Chewbacca almost killed him and I’m pretty sure R2 planted a tracking device on him, but I can’t be sure and I’m _so glad you’re awake_.”

Excited is a good look on her. His favourite. And he’d keep hugging her but there’s a small cough from behind them and Rey reluctantly releases him.

Poe seems surprised when Rey hugs him, as well, though it’s substantially less enthusiastic, which Finn can’t help but feel smug about. “Told you.”

“You did,” Rey agrees. She steps back into Finn’s orbit and he raises an arm to wrap around her waist, but drops it hastily when he realizes what he’s doing. Rey glances at him sidelong, but doesn’t seem irritated.

That’s when General Organa steps in—he’d say swoops, but she has far too much quiet dignity to swoop—and ushers Rey out of the hanger to provide a full debrief. Finn and Poe watch her go, Finn gnawing on his bottom lip and wondering if she’ll be allowed out of the General’s sight anytime in the next parsec.

As it happens, Rey manages to get away about two hours later; Finn isn’t going to lie and say he hasn’t been waiting for her the whole time, but she stumbles over to him and drops down on the ground beside him, looking longingly at the flaky pastry he liberated from Poe’s kitchen.

He breaks it roughly down the center and hands her the larger half, which she tucks into ravenously. She relaxes in inches, leaning heavily against him until he’s got most of her weight pressed into his side.

“This is the best thing I’ve ever eaten,” she tells him.

“Wait until you try his flapjacks,” Finn replies. He’d gotten sick a few times on the rich offerings Poe had placed in front of him—his body accustomed to carefully measured nutritional rations that tasted like paste and cardboard—but he’s slowly getting used to it, and he wants Rey to get used to it, too. She’s lost some of the starved hardness that must’ve defined her life on Jakku, but he wants to make sure she always has enough to eat, instead of desperately scraping together enough junk to get a quarter ration, or whatever nonsense she had to deal with when she was on her own.

The pastry is so crumbly that it barely passes his lips before falling apart, and he’d like nothing better than to just shove the rest of it into his mouth, but one look at the hungry way Rey is eying it and he passes it her way.

She hesitates, then breaks it in half again and hands him the second piece.

They sit in silent contemplation of baked goods, staring out at the world that’s supposed to become home.

* * *

A week after Rey returns from her mission, and Poe’s entire life feels like a confused bundle of yarn that someone incorrectly balled up, confused and messy and frankly more than a little chaotic.

Problem one: Finn’s laugh.

Problem two: Rey’s smile.

Problem three: they both seem to have the same awful sense of humour, and whenever they find something funny, he’s subjected to the torturous experience of the first two problems bundled together.

He’s willing to bet General Organa never had this sort of problem.

He sits in his cockpit, supposedly doing checks, but ultimately ends up navel-gazing until he finally decides there’s not help for it; he’s just going to have to deal with it in a mature, rational way.

Which is why he messages his grandfather that evening to get the recipe for his tiingilar. The dish his grandfather served his grandmother when he started courting her; an old family recipe that’s been passed down since before ‘Dameron’ was even their name. A tried, tested and true way of getting to the heart of your sweetie, or so his grandfather has always said.

He’s barely managed a breath between sending the message and his grandfather’s reply.

Poe’s grandfather is creeping up in the years, even though he doesn’t like to admit it, and he looks almost frail when he responds to Poe’s message. Poe traces the lines in his face—the familiar and the new—and almost misses the first half of the message.

“My dear boy,” his voice is shakier than Poe remembers it. “I’m so happy to share this recipe with you.”

Poe’s hand cramps halfway through writing down the ingredients, but he muscles through it in the name of romance and also dinner. He’s barely finished when his door swishes open and Finn and Rey half-fall through it.

“Hey,” he eases back in his chair and tries to look casual, and not as though he was just planning his seduction through spice and meat. Rey smiles at him—it’s blinding, really, someone needs to make a law about that sort of look—and neatly elbows Finn in the side, eliciting a laugh and _seriously why does the universe hate him?_

“Here,” Finn says. “Neek just brought some from off-world.” He holds up a loosely wrapped lump of something that smells like burnt sugar, and hands it to Finn.

Twi’lek toffee. Poe hasn’t had it in… wow. A while.

They look at him expectantly and Poe breaks off the smallest piece he can manage and slips it into his mouth. The sound he makes is probably borderline obscene, and when he opens his eyes—when did they close?—Rey is watching his mouth, and Finn is pointedly _not_.

“We should have dinner tomorrow,” Poe blurts out.

Rey’s brow furrows. “We have dinner all the time,” she points out.

“A special dinner.” He coughs. “If you want.”

Rey and Finn glance at each other, and in a series of subtle facial twitches Poe can almost follow they come to a consensus, and a second later Finn nods.

“We definitely should,” he says for both of them.

Maybe there’s hope for this after all.

* * *

When Rey first asks General Organa for her advice, she looks amused, then pained, then amused all over again and offers Rey a bottle of Corellian red to take to Poe’s rooms for dinner.

“How is this going to help?” Rey asks, eyeing the bottle warily. Her experiences with liquor have largely been spirits made of Jakku’s sparse vegetation and distilled through old ship parts. She’s heard of people dying over particularly strong batches.

“It’s traditional,” General Organa tells her. “The sort of thing that someone gives you when you’re…” She trails off and turns her attention to a convenient star map. Rey longs to tell her how much she misses Han, too, but it seems like shallow words, considering the breadth of General Organa’s loss alongside Rey’s. Instead, she touches the other woman’s shoulder.

“Thank you, General Organa.”

“For goodness sakes, Rey, you can call me Leia. If you’re going to be trained by my brother, it’s the least you can do.”

Rey blinks. “But he said—”

Leia’s mouth fixes in a hard line. “You told me what he said,” she replies. “And Chewie and I are going back to explain to him why his answer was unacceptable.”

Rey is definitely relieved not to be on the receiving end of that conversation.

General Organa—Leia—bids her goodnight and Rey makes her way to Poe’s room. Poe and Finn’s room? Nominally, Finn has his own living space, but he doesn’t seem inclined to abandon the portable cot that Poe has set up for him. Rey can appreciate that… most nights, she sleeps on the Falcon.

She can smell whatever Finn is cooking from down the hallway, and her mouth begins to water immediately. It smells spicy—she loves spicy anything, it tastes like waking up—and if she focuses for even a moment she can feel the press of Finn and Poe moving around their room. Poe squarely centered in the kitchen and Finn making encroachments that Poe barely manages to fend off.

BB-8 rolls past her with a happy chirp, off to fawn over R2 while they’re still on base, and she steps into the room as Finn whines, “I wanna dive into it and live there.”

Poe chuckles, warm and welcoming, and Rey can think of somewhere else she’d like to live.

Poe accepts the bottle with an impressed whistle—Rey will have to do something extra special for General Organa once she returns from Luke Skywalker’s retreat—and goes looking for some glasses. The entire room is suffused with the scent of spices and warmed through by the heat coming off the stove. She takes a seat on the stool next to Finn’s and leans into him, happy.

When she’s not actively trying to shut it down, the Force flows through her, around her, and brings her impressions of things she’d miss otherwise. It happened on Jakku, as well, though she never knew how to put a name to what it was. Poe is a bundle of nervousness and care, hope and tender affection. Finn is relaxed and doesn’t have the same nervous energy, but the softer emotions are still there. And as for herself. Well.

“You can have us, you know,” she tells Poe.

He drops his spoon into the pot, and she feels Finn smiling beside her.

She looks Finn’s way. “Right?”

“Definitely,” Finn agrees. He twines his fingers through hers and they look at Poe expectantly. They seem to have thrown him off his game, and he looks helplessly at dinner as though it’s got the answers he needs, when obviously the answers are taking up space on his kitchen stools.

Rey nudges Finn off his stool, and raptly watches him stalk up to Poe. For someone who marched for most of his life, he does ‘stalking’ terribly well. For a second, he looks unsure, and she’s glad that Poe already knows them well enough to work with them. He leans in and brushes his lips against Finn’s. Soft and still painfully uncertain, like his entire plan has crumbled apart because they skipped dinner and went right to the afterwards.

Whatever his hesitation, Finn gets over it quickly. It’s nice enough to watch, but Rey has never been the type of person to sit passively by, and she hops off her stool to join them.

Poe tastes like the spices he’s been cooking with, and Finn’s tongue cools the burn of them from her lips. She’s not overly accustomed to kissing—there were always different priorities on Jakku, and such comforts had to be carved out with more energy than she usually felt like expending—but she can tell that Finn’s as new at it as she is. Not that it bothers her. Or Poe, as far as she can tell, from the quick thrum of his heartbeat under her palm and the way his breath catches in his throat over and over again.

“I…” he pauses. “I mean, it’s good cold. We could have it for breakfast?”

Arousal apparently robs him of his silver tongue—hopefully only in the area of speech and not practical application—and she kisses him in agreement.

* * *

“I should reheat breakfast,” Poe murmurs, still half-asleep. His fingers trace their way up Finn’s ribs, right towards the ticklish spot that Rey discovered the night before. Finn bats him away, but Poe is unfortunately persistent, and manages to wrangle an undignified giggle from his lips before Finn rolls over and plants one on him to distract him away from his intended target.

“Just stay,” Rey murmurs sleepily beside them. “Food can wait.”

Poe hums and gathers up the mostly-discarded blankets—it’s hot, sharing a bed between three people—and throws the lightest one over them, and acquiesces to joining them in sleep.


End file.
